Question

I am developing winform(c#) that start/stop/restart windows services. I want to put a progress bar till the action is completed. I am new to .net programming. Kindly help me on to achieve this.

Answer 1

You cannot show meaningful progress when you don’t know how long it takes. You can’t know, services take anywhere from 1 to 30 seconds to start. All you can do is show a “I’m not dead, working on it” indicator to the user. ProgressBar supports that, set the Style property to “Marquee”.

You’ll also need to start the service in a worker thread to avoid your UI from freezing. That’s best done with a BackgroundWorker. Make it look similar to this:

public partial class Form1 : Form {
    public Form1() {
        InitializeComponent();
        ServiceProgressBar.Style = ProgressBarStyle.Marquee;
        ServiceProgressBar.Visible = false;
    }

    private void StartButton_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) {
        this.StartButton.Enabled = false;
        this.ServiceProgressBar.Visible = true;
        this.backgroundWorker1.RunWorkerAsync("foo");
    }

    private void backgroundWorker1_DoWork(object sender, DoWorkEventArgs e) {
        var ctl = new ServiceController((string)e.Argument);
        ctl.Start();
    }

    private void backgroundWorker1_RunWorkerCompleted(object sender, RunWorkerCompletedEventArgs e) {
        this.StartButton.Enabled = true;
        this.ServiceProgressBar.Visible = false;
        if (e.Error != null) {
            MessageBox.Show(e.Error.ToString(), "Could not start service");
        }
    }